


Mature Love

by numberdance



Category: The Cranes Dance - Meg Howrey
Genre: Aromantic, Ballet, F/M, Frederick Ashton - Freeform, Midsummer Night's Dream
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-05-04
Packaged: 2019-05-02 07:24:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14539602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/numberdance/pseuds/numberdance
Summary: Marius, of course, learns to portray love onstage. For an audience he falls in love and in love and in love, over and over again.





	Mature Love

The first ballet Marius sees is Frederick Ashton’s Dream. He is overwhelmed, immersed, taken as the fairies flit across the stage to open the ballet. He hadn’t thought ballet was supposed to look that way, but somehow it is exactly how fairies should look. Over the years he goes back and watches that scene again and again. He dissects it, dissects the choreography, hands and feet and arms and legs and heads. Dissects the timing, the grouping and placement of dancers. The musicality. He takes the scene apart for himself, always seeking something new, and Ashton never disappoints.

Marius reads A Midsummer Night’s Dream in school and only then realizes how much of the story Ashton cut. He watches the whole ballet again, after. While it’s not the full story Shakespeare told, it is a complete story. (It’s a sharp contrast to Balanchine’s take; Marius has never been so disappointed in a ballet’s character development, and he hadn’t considered that a balletic strength in the first place.) Oberon and Titania’s relationship arcs to end in their pas, their reconciliation, fae and powerful and united.

Marius knows he should be aiming for Oberon someday, but in his dreams, he leaps and turns as Puck instead.

When he is sixteen, Marius dates a fellow dance student. Lia is nice, he enjoys talking to her, and she’s pretty, with her long lines, elegantly winged foot in arabesque, and port de bras that make it hard to look away. They’ve hung out while not in class, and she seems to expect something, so he asks her out. They date for most of a school year; they kiss and cuddle and have sex, stretch and eat lunch and go to shows. But Marius always feels a pressure, like he’s supposed to love her in a way that he doesn’t. Lia is his best friend by this point, and they have fun, but he thinks of pas de deux – Romeo and Juliet in her bedroom, Kitri and Basilio, Swanhilda and Franz, the pair in Duo Concertant, even Ashton's Titania and Oberon – and what he feels for Lia isn’t like that. For her he would be a supportive partner, a generous one, a selfless one, but romance is different.

Marius admits these things to Lia, and she takes his hands and squeezes them, tells him that their friendship is more than enough. They break up, and he partners her in the end-of-year performance in a piece that’s more interested in movement than in people.

Marius has the talent, work ethic, and build for the principal roles. He climbs the ranks in a handful of years. But he holds on tight to the parts that offer him something else, something that feels truer to how he is in the world. In Romeo and Juliet he dances Mercutio, loyal and protective and of good humor. In Dark Elegies he dances grief above anything else. Interplay is friendship and fun, jazz and joy (and Marius is always relieved to not be cast in the pas). In parts like those, Marius feels like the audience gets to see him as a person, not only as a dancer. They’re welcome respite in the midst of all the Siegfrieds, Basilios, Desires, Solors, unnamed princes.

He, of course, learns to portray love onstage. For an audience he falls in love and in love and in love, over and over again, usually with Lia. They fistbump and hug at the end of every performance, even when they’ve been fighting about something. (They’re friends; it happens.) Lia goes home to her husband (and, by the time she retires, two children), and he goes home to his windowsill of tenderly cared for plants. His neighbor, a retired oceanographer, takes care of them when Marius is on tour.

When Lia retires, it is already clear that Marius is being groomed for artistic staff; three years later, he becomes artistic director. The shorter ballets he’s choreographed to that point are all romance-free, but with the new mantle comes the care and keeping of the evening-length story ballets.

Marius never loved ballet for its stories but rather for how its stories were told. Nevertheless, he looks into these stories, many of which have felt like a plague upon him for two decades, and he sees possibility. There is romantic love at their core, yes, but it is not alone. And so he focuses in on those other moments – the friendship among the three musketeers and D’Artagnan, the loyalty of Ivor to Siegfried, Lady Capulet’s heart breaking as she chooses her husband’s will over her daughter’s, the dark notes in Prokofiev’s score for Cinderella.

He can speak romantic attraction now, having danced it and watched it for so long. He has picked apart countless pas de deux the way he once had done with Ashton’s for Titania and Oberon. When he stops David and Kate in their rehearsal of his own Titania and Oberon pas, he thinks he’s thinking of love at first, romantic love. “Mature love,” he says, and “passion with authority.” But in partnering Kate, in continuing to try to explain, he finds his way to a truth: this is a pas about him and Lia, and it needs no romance in it. He doesn’t know how to tell them that, though, doesn’t know how to explain that relationship, even when what Kate and David do isn’t… isn’t quite right.

And then Kate starts talking, and she gets it. Not the relationship, but the moment. The consideration and support and familiarity. Trying to be better for each other. Making each other better.

That moment – and so many others when Kate has seen a piece of him, understood the sense of his choreography – is what’s on his mind when he propositions her in the restaurant. He takes it back immediately; it’s not the point, not what he really wants of her. And sex isn’t necessary for her to see him any more than romance is. She has the eye for his job, and the instinct, and he wants to nourish that. But it is not a lie that he is lonely, not a lie that it would be good to have someone to talk to.

Good to have someone see him true.


End file.
